The Obama administration’s new “education equity initiative” is more likely to produce “a blizzard of paperwork than to improve the education of minority children,” writes R. Shep Melnick, a Boston College professor, in Education Next.

In a 37-page “Dear Colleague” letter, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) demands “that each school district provide a detailed accounting of resources available to schools with varying racial demographics,” writes Melnick.

Cited in the DCL’s 63 footnotes are studies indicating that targeting large sums to high-quality programs can help disadvantaged children. But the letter virtually ignores a key question: what constitutes a high-quality program?

School leaders face a choice, he writes.

. . . they can devote abundant time and money to collecting the information that OCR demands, massaging the data to make themselves look good, and shifting money around here and there to show they are making “progress.” (For instance, the quickest way to appease OCR will be to increase the number of AP courses available to minority students, regardless of whether this is the school’s most pressing need.)

On the other hand, schools can call OCR’s bluff. They can say, “We . . . prefer to spend money on teachers than on accountants.”

Districts that lose federal funds for non-compliance can go to federal court, where they’re very likely to win, writes Melnick. They could overturn this “Dear Colleague” letter and earlier letters on sexual harassment, programs for English language learners and school discipline.

“I don’t agree that (students) . . . have to be coddled and protected from different points of view,” said the president, who’s apparently read The Coddling of the American Mind in The Atlantic.

I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. I gotta tell you, I don’t agree with that either.

. . . anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, “You can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say.” That’s not the way we learn either.

President Obama’s plan to rate colleges on affordability and success rates collapsed. But the Education Department’s new College Scorecard provides useful information for families wondering what a particular college costs by family income and what percentage of students earn a degree and begin paying off their student debts within three years.

Most intriguing, the Scorecard uses IRS data to show enrollees’ median annual earnings 10 years after enrollment and the percentage who earn more than the average high school graduate, about $25,000 a year, six years after entering college. The information includes dropouts and graduates.

PayScale is using the federal data to calculate the 20-year return on investment at different colleges for students in various family income quintiles.

I’m sure students and parents will find the Scorecard useful. But it has its limits. The highly selective colleges have strong graduation rates and graduates who do well in the workplace, though earnings are lower at liberal arts colleges, higher at technical schools. The less selective schools have much lower graduation rates. Their former students and graduates earn less and have more trouble repaying their debts.

Does an A+ student become a high earner because he chose Georgia Tech over Duke? Does the B- student become a low-earning dropout because she chose the not-very-selective state university over the not-very-selective private college?

I’m not sure C- students will use the Scorecard. If they do, they’ll see that the sort of college they can get into has very low graduation rates and low earnings payoffs. They’ll see two-year vocational degrees, but won’t see vocational certificates.

President Obama has called for guaranteeing two years of tuition-free higher education to all Americans. That will raise enrollment, writes Adela Soliz, a Brookings researcher. But free college won’t lead to more degrees unless it’s linked to performance, she predicts.

Soliz suggests using “financial aid dollars to reward students for earning a particular GPA, completing a certain number of credits, or demonstrating other behaviors that may increase student persistence and completion, such as meeting regularly with an advisor.”

University of California at Riverside tops the Washington Monthly’s college rankings, which give top honors to schools that enroll and graduate “students of modest means” while “charging them a reasonable price,” write the editors.

The rankings also give credit for research — are these schools “creating the new technologies and ideas that will drive economic growth and advance human knowledge?” — and whether they encourage students to join the military or the Peace Corps or perform community service.

You’ll see it doesn’t intersect very much with U.S. News‘ college rankings.

Two years ago, President Obama pledged to rate every college and university in America by “who’s offering the best value,” note the Monthly‘s editors.

The higher ed lobby mobilized to kill the ratings plan. In June, it was canceled.

President Obama lauded competency-based education in a speech at SUNY-Buffalo two years ago.

Giving “course credit based on how well students master the material, not just on how many hours they spend in the classroom” will help students finish a degree faster and for less money, the president said.

But no CBE experiments have been launched, writes Amy Laitinen on EdCentral. Colleges are eager to launch competency programs, she writes, “but the Department of Education has been dragging its feet.”

Under the Obama administration’s plan, grants of up to $5,775 a year would go directly to colleges and universities that provide courses to prisoners.

Of 700,000 prisoners released each year, more than 40 percent will be back behind bars within three years, said Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who announced the program at a Maryland prison on Friday.

“For every dollar invested in prison education programs, this saves taxpayers on average $5,” said Lois Davis, who authored a RAND study. Inmates who take college classes are 16 percent less likely to return to prison, she estimated.

Congress provided nearly $300 million last year to fund job training and re-entry programs for prisoners, said Republican Lamar Alexander, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, in a statement.

Pell aid might be a “worthwhile idea for some prisoners,” but the administration has no authority to ignore the law, Alexander said. “Congress can address changes to Pell grants as part of the Senate education committee’s work to reauthorize the Higher Education Act this fall.”

The “cafeteria college” — take whatever courses you fancy — isn’t serving students’ needs, argues Tom Bailey, who runs the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia.

Without college-educated parents to guide them — and good luck getting time with a college counselor — many community college students pick courses that won’t help them reach their goals. They get frustrated and drop out. Or they transfer and learn that their credits won’t be counted.

The “defined pathway” that we’re talking about would create a default program, which would lay out semester by semester the courses a student needs to complete a degree.

It provides an easier way to understand sequence of courses. If you want to take other courses you can, but then you have to talk to somebody about that. It has to be part of a plan.

Some colleges offer “nine or 10 meta majors,” says Bailey. “You might not know you want to be a nurse, but you’re interested in the medical field. Or business. There are some basic courses in those fields that everybody takes. They don’t need to specialize that much.”

President Obama’s plan to make community college free won’t raise the graduation rate unless it’s combined with other reforms, says Bailey. “Financial burdens do prevent students from continuing, but I think the evidence about whether that alone will do it is much weaker.”

Hillary Clinton’s campaign announcement video features multi-ethnic, straight and gay Americans starting new things. “My daughter is starting kindergarten next year, and so we’re moving, just so she can belong to a better school,” says a woman.

Hamlet and Olesia Garcia were convicted of education fraud for enrolling their daughter in a neighboring district near Philadelphia.

It’s nice she and her mate can afford to buy a house in a good school district, but what about all the ordinary Americans stuck with a so-so neighborhood school? Dropout Nation’s Rishawn Biddle calls this “zip code education.” Good public schools are free for those who can make a big enough mortgage payment.

Is the video a calculated nod to charter-hating teachers’ unions, a sign Clinton will reverse Obama’s education reform agenda? Or, as Jonathan Chait suspects, is moving for a better school a middle-class reality that Clinton’s advisors never thought to question?

Hoping to push Clinton to the left, the Nation posed 15 questions it wants the candidate to answer, notes Chait. Anti-reformer Diane Ravitch asked: “Secretary Clinton, would you please state where you stand on the expansion of privately managed charter schools, which drain funding from public schools that accept all children.”

Charters have to accept all applicants, holding a lottery if too many apply, writes Chait. Traditional public schools “accept all children whose parents can afford the property fee.”

In my city, like many cities, the most desirable neighborhood schools are located in expensive neighborhoods. . . One of the things you pay for when you buy an expensive home is the right to live in a school district where most of the children will come from highly educated two-parent families. Schools that are tied to residential property patterns will inevitably reflect the racially and socioeconomically segregated pattern of American housing.

Turning “public education into an adjunct of private property rights” is “a very strange value system for the left to embrace,” concludes Chait.

Another liberal, Kevin Chavous of American Federation for Children wants Clinton to support school choice.

After years of encouraging young Americans to earn college degrees, President Obama is telling them they just need technical skills, not a degree. The $100 million TechHire initiative will try to persuade employers to hire technical workers with alternative credentials.

“It turns out it doesn’t matter where you learned code, it just matters how good you are at writing code,” Obama said in a speech to the National League of Cities conference. “If you can do the job, you should get the job.”

High-tech employers see “non-traditional training as a viable alternative,” writes Issie Lapowsky on Wired. “Training startups like Codecademy and General Assembly, as well as online course companies like Coursera, have been pushing” the idea for years.

TechHire will try to develop “standards for alternative education” and “a guide for employers on how to recruit tech workers from less traditional places,” reports Lapowsky. A company called Knack will “make a standard tech aptitude test free to employers and training organizations.”

The president says employers are losing money by leaving technical jobs unfilled. So, don’t they have an incentive to figure out how to test technical aptitude?

The $100 million would fund programs that help women, minorities, veterans and people with disabilities qualify for tech jobs. More than 300 employers have agreed to consider hiring graduates of these programs.